An unsparing look at one of the great war crimes of the 20th
century
To this day, many Japanese argue that their country was the
victim and not the perpetrator of the Pacific War, and that even
in losing the war, Japan can be proud that it led to the end of
western colonialism in Asia. Of course this blinks the fact that
Japan was one of the worst colonialists ever to set foot in
another country. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the
Japanese military's infamous "comfort stations"--largely staffed
by unwilling young women from the colonies.
The largest number of "comfort women" were Korean and Chinese,
followed perhaps by prostitutes recruited in Japan itself. (Even
where the comfort women had earlier worked in "the shameful
profession," as the Japanese military called it, there's a
question as to how voluntary this was. As late as 1933, Japanese
prostitutes were confined to red-light districts, and extreme
measures were used to prevent them from escaping.) But everywhere
the Japanese army and navy went, local women were rounded up and
sent to the military brothels. Catholic Filipinas, Dutch
Indonesians, Pacific Islanders, and perhaps Australian
nurses--all were grist for sexual slavery.
As a Japanese trying to convince a reluctant public to accept
the facts of the comfort stations, Yoshioki spends too much time
trying to prove a connection between them and the military high
command. Personally, I was willing to take this connection on
faith, knowing what I do about how how Japan
treated its male captives. Then, too, I could have done
without the translator's introduction, with its almost-comical
attempt to put sexual slavery into the context of today's women's
studies. Really, Ms O'Brien, I didn't need your ruminations on
the patriarchy!
These faults aside, Comfort Women is a spellbinding and
terrible recital of crimes that can never be forgiven. Girls as
young as 10 were rounded up in the Philippines. Sometimes the
recruits were bought as chattel, from their families or from
brothel-keepers; more often they were tricked with promises of jobs as
nurses, laundrywomen, and factory workers. Typically they were
given a rough medical examination, which to an ignorant virgin
was terrifying enough. Then they were raped by officers. Finally
they went into the comfort stations, often thousands of miles
from home, sometimes in combat zones (where they were indeed
required to serve as nurses). In distant places, the headman would
be ordered to supply the women, an order that was met by handing
over the village's widows.
A day's schedule at the comfort station might go like this: from
9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., private soldiers had the run of the place.
From 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., the comfort station was reserved for
non-commissioned officers. (Note that the women had half an hour
to clean up for the second shift.) At 8:30 p.m, officers got
exclusive use of the place. This might seem to reverse the normal
order of privilege, but when you consider that officers could stay
until morning, you realize that the women were
hardly fresher at 10 a.m. than they were at 10 p.m. Yoshiaki
cites the case of one woman in Burma who was forced to service
(there can be no other word for it) 60 men in a single day,
though six or seven was probably more typical. When a woman protested at the quantity of
customers forced upon her, she was tied to the bed, and the
line continued to move. They might be given Saturday afternoon off,
but otherwise it was around the clock, seven days a week.
In small units, and close to the front, the women often spent
their mornings working as cooks and chambermaids, only getting on
their backs in the afternoon. They were often raped, stabbed,
beaten, and kicked, and almost never was a Japanese soldier
disciplined for maltreating them.
Because of the wilful destruction of records in August 1945,
and the "willing amnesia" of today, the numbers of women forced
to endure this treatment can't be known for sure. Yoshiaka uses a
range of 50,000 to 200,000. Elsewhere he notes that one Japanese
army command rounded up women on the basis of one for 80 soldiers
in its command. Given the massive size of the Japanese military
at the height of the Pacific War, I find it easy to believe that
the figure was north of 100,000.
Postwar, the women suffered not only from the disease, sexual
dysfunction, and trauma that had been inflicted upon them by the
Japanese military, but also from the social stigma of their
families and villages--if indeed they were able to go home. While
most Japanese comfort women were repatriated in September 1944,
there was no return trip for the Koreans, Chinese, and others who
had been sent to the far reaches of the empire. Some of these
women were turned up in the South Pacific in the 1990s, flotsam
from a 50-year-old war.
At the risk of appearing to take the plight of white women
more seriously than that of Asians, I'll conclude with Jeanne
O'Hearn, who published her story as Cry of the Raped in
Australia in 1992. The daughter of Dutch sugar planters, she was
a 21-year-old novice at a Fransiscan nunnery when the Japanese
invaded. She was interned until February 1944, when a Japanese
officer ordered all women in the camp over the age of 17 to
parade for inspection. Sixteen were selected, trucked to a hotel,
and divided into groups according to their comeliness, with the
best-looking destined for an officers' brothel. On opening night,
O'Hearn was raped by several officers in sequence, and raped
again by the military doctor who came to examine her for venereal
disease. Her story concludes:
"Even after almost fifty years, I still experience
this feeling of total fear going through my body and through all
my limbs, burning me up. It comes to me at the oddest moments in
which I wake up with nightmares and even feel it when just lying
in bed at night. But worse of all, I felt this fear every time my
husband made love to me. I have never been able to enjoy
intercourse as a consequence of what the Japanese did to
me."
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